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Wednesday, March 24, 2010

Refinishing the upstairs hardwoods

Ever since we refinished our stairs last year, the plan was to continue that sexy Espresso stain onto the upstairs hardwoods. We chose this week to work on this project, which is pretty bad timing as I just completed the Art Room and Dressing Room a couple months ago, and now all the trim and doors have to be repainted. Story of my life! We decided to refinish the hallways, master closet, art room and dressing room, leaving the three largest bedrooms to be done later on. The first thing we did was take all of the stuff out of those rooms and pile it into the other bedrooms. The mess is intense, but we're sleeping on a mattress in the living room, anyway. It's like camping, only crappy.

The second task was to use painters plastic to wrap up all our vents, wall fixtures and doorways. This took awhile, but is very necessary. I covered all the walls in the art room because I didn't want that dust all over my flat-finish navy walls. Don't ever choose ultra flat paint for dark walls, everything shows!

Doesn't the capiz light look...uh...interesting with the plastic? ha

And I got the frosted door I've always wanted, at least for a day...

Towels were shoved under the doorways to the remaining bedrooms. When we were done with the large orbital sander, we opened the doors and removed the towels and plastic to sand the thresholds with the hand sander.I recommend using an orbital because they are more forgiving than a drum sander. See my full 'how-to' on refinishing floors here. We had a couple helpers that allowed us to get everything sanded in about 6 hours!

The speed of their sanding was the only reason I approved a beer break. Har har.Thanks, Frank and JR!

It worked to our advantage that most of the poly was already rubbed off the floors. The orbital sanding was quick, this photo was about 15 minutes into the sanding of this room, I almost didn't make it up there in time to snap a 'during' picture!

I am exhausted just reading that! That is the reason the floors in the back of our house are still unfinished (they're partially sanded and will probably remain that way). Kudos to you! I can't wait until the reveal. And just out of curiousity, how many bedrooms to you have?! I have a feeling I'm going to be jealous knowing the answer!

It's so cool to see the process of taping sanding etc...so much work! We have a small house so, the n 'plan' is to do ours all at once, which means stsying in a hotel or at my sis's I hope we can get started on it this spring

I'd say a beer break was in order. You two are incredible with your projects! Can I confess that I start to get lazy? But you remind me how important it is to not cut any curtains. Your house is too fabulous for words. Can't wait to see how it all looks with those gorgeous espresso floors!

About Me

My name is Sara. I am a home owner/renovator, photographer, and stay at home mom in SE Minnesota trying to cram all kinds of projects into the time my son is at daycare or school. Ashford is 2, so things are pretty busy around here! I like slightly inappropriate humor, wine, and stalking house blogs. I love starting new DIY projects and sometimes hate finishing them. I love taking portraits of families, children and couples whenever I can. This blog is all about the projects my husband and I tackle, the projects that fizzle, and the funny things that happen to us along the way.